Maybe one of them had stirred as Jane Whitefield passed. 'It’s only me,' she whispered.
'What?' said Felker.
'Just talking to myself.'
She moved along in silence, trying to choose what was best to do. The police would come and they would be looking for the one-lighted car. If they didn’t, the four men would at least have that to think about, and it would make them search for Felker on foot. She had to get him into town before the men got there.
They jogged between houses and through yards, listening for watchdogs and policemen more carefully than for the four men. At last they reached the lake road. There were arcades and small shops, all still boarded up from the winter, and little cottages built low and sturdy because the storms coming in off the lake could be fierce. She considered breaking into one of them and hiding until daylight came and the four men had to leave.
'That one,' she whispered.
He said, 'Let’s take a look.'
She watched him dart across the road, and then followed. He stepped to the side and looked into the window of the garage. 'No car,' he whispered.
Jane looked into the garage window. She cupped her hands against the glass to keep out the reflections and tried to make out shapes. It took her a few seconds to be sure, and then she spun around. Felker was gone.
Jane walked around to the back of the house and found him. He was standing with his face beside the electric meter, staring at it in the dim light. 'What are you doing?' she asked.
'If anybody’s here, the house uses electricity— refrigerator, furnace, clocks.'
'No,' she said. 'Come back.'
He followed her to the garage. There was a big, thick padlock that held a sliding bolt that went into the woods beside the door. She tugged on it. 'Do you have a knife?'
He nodded and pulled a lock-blade pocketknife with a four-inch blade out of his pocket.
'Try to carve it out,' she said. As he started to gouge the wood, Jane went to the front comer of the house to keep watch.
In thirty seconds he was beside her. He held up the bolt with the lock still attached. 'The screws popped. It was old.'
They dragged the aluminum boat out of the garage. Jane could tell that the owner had done this often, because as soon as they had cleared the noisy gravel of the driveway, the boat found its own keel mark worn into the ground. They pushed it down the sloping path to the edge of the water, climbed back up, and went into the garage.
It was dark and dusty. In the summer the owner probably kept his boat on the shore and parked his car in here, but now it was a storage shed for all the equipment that had to be protected from the weather.
Jane found the oars leaning upright in a corner, and a couple of life jackets hanging from a six-penny nail driven into a stud. There was a crude stand made of a two-by-ten nailed upright on a sawhorse for the ten- horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Felker began to unscrew the clamps, but Jane stopped him. 'Take this stuff down while I look for the gas can. If we don’t find that, it won’t be worth much.'
Felker took the oars and life jackets and hurried down to the boat, then returned. She held up the red five- gallon can with the double hose attached and shook it. 'Empty. I was afraid of that. Everything’s too neat, too squared away. This guy wouldn’t leave gas in a wooden garage for six months. If he had, we would have smelled it. Let me think for a minute.'
Felker said, 'We could row.'
They went outside again and stared up and down the road. There were several buildings that weren’t really cottages. They were houses, and they looked occupied. There were cars in some driveways, and big yards. 'Somebody’s cutting the lawns,' she said. 'Lawnmowers.'
'Do we have time?' he asked.
'Let’s give it one try. If we don’t find it right away, we leave.'
They sneaked across the road to a house with a big, well-trimmed front lawn. The wide sliding garage door was closed, but the side door was unlocked. Jane slipped inside. There was a big car, an old Oldsmobile that took up most of the space, and there was a lawnmower against the wall. Jane moved closer to it and sniffed. There was no smell of gas. She touched it, and felt the long, coiled cord. Her luck tonight was unbelievable. How many people had an electric lawnmower? She stepped back and her bottom touched the side of the car. She turned and looked at it closely. It was at least twenty years old, and that was promising. Maybe it was old enough not to have a lock to protect the gas.
Jane opened the gas door and felt for the gas cap It unscrewed. She hurried to the door of the garage and took the gas can from Felker. She found some duct tape on the shelf at the back wall of the garage and taped down the thumb release on the motor end of the hose, then draped it into the car’s gas tank, unscrewed the cap on the five-gallon can, and started pumping the rubber bulb on the hose. As she pumped, she thought it through again. It should work. The mechanism was supposed to pump air into the gas tank from one hose to increase the pressure, so the gas would flow into the outboard motor through the other hose. With the cap off and the hoses in the car’s gas tank, the gas should come through the air hose into the— It worked. She could hear a squishing sound and feel the change as the rubber bulb filled with gasoline. Then she was milking gasoline into the can. As she worked, she looked at the floor under the car. She could see a shine that indicated the Oldsmobile was also old enough to leak oil. It took her a moment to spot a yellow plastic pint bottle with the Pennzoil logo on the shelf above the car. She unscrewed it and poured that into the gas tank as she pumped. The oil might not be the right weight, but it would probably keep an outboard motor from seizing up for one night.
Suddenly, Felker was beside her again. 'They’re out there,' he whispered. 'In the street. Better get ready.'
Jane stopped pumping, picked up her shotgun, and stepped to the side door of the garage. She opened it a crack and saw them. They had spread out, and two were walking on one side of the street and two on the other. Each time they passed an empty cottage, one of them would leave the road and walk around the back, only to emerge again and go on to the next one. She closed the door the rest of the way and smiled. They had the right street, but this was one of the few houses they would avoid, because it was occupied.
She waited a few minutes to let them get far enough away, then left Felker at the door and went back to pumping gasoline. When the can was full, she capped it and handed it to Felker. She went across the street first this time, then stopped by the comer of the cottage to stare in the direction the four men had taken. When Felker had loaded the can into the boat and carried the heavy outboard motor down the slope, she slowly backed around the cottage and went to the garage. She fitted the padlock and hasp to the door and pushed the screws back into the holes, took a last look, and hurried down to the lake.
She and Felker pushed the boat a few feet forward until the bow began to bob in the quiet waves. 'Gentlemen first,' she said.
Felker stepped into the boat and set the oars in the oarlocks. Jane handed him her shotgun and said, 'Go up in the bow.' When he did, his weight raised the stem of the boat off the shore. She gave the boat a hard push, scrambled past the motor over the transom, and they glided out a few feet, bobbing in the gentle waves.
Felker came aft to the oar seat, handed Jane her shotgun, and began to row. The aluminum boat was no more than fourteen feet long, and built to be light. Felker was not a great oarsman, but he was strong. A few powerful strokes propelled them past the hissing one-foot breakers out onto the long, rolling swells. She busied herself with the outboard motor, connecting the fuel hose to it, checking to be sure Felker had screwed it onto the transom tightly enough, and getting it ready to start. If the four men happened to be looking at the lake, then it wouldn’t matter how loud the motor was. She was going to have to get them moving.
They pushed out into the darkness in silence. Jane faced the stem, her shotgun across her lap, staring back at the shore. All of the cottages along the waterline were dark. The only light came from farther back, where the streetlights were. The only noises now were an occasional squeak of the oars in the oarlocks and the quiet swish of the blades in the water. If they could just get out far enough onto the lake without the four men seeing or hearing them, this would work. The four men would lose them completely. They might go back and search her house in Deganawida. They might even get caught doing it.
It was cold on the water. Within a few minutes she was convinced that the northwest wind was proceeding unimpeded from some glacier in the center of Canada across the empty lakes to the sweat-soaked clothes of Jane Whitefield. She folded her arms, hugged the shotgun in them, and kept her eyes on the shore.
